Eerie, that having taken a break from revising Berkeley, Hume, induction, idealism, and causality, I would decide to start Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths, the first story of which (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius) is entirely concerned with just such subjects, mentioning Hume and Berkeley by name. You’ll forgive me for not elaborating on it, as I have just completed said revision. Anyway, stumbling upon that story, it was as though I had mistakenly started reading my course materials. Eerie.

Maybe Jack Black should oust RTD. (Because it appears I can’t discuss anything without linking it to a rant about televisual light entertainment.)

Inspiration, apparently, means ‘breathed upon’. (Which kind of figures if you think about it.) The inspired recieves the breath of a divinity, which then speaks through them. In Latin, it is ingenium, which provides a neat link to the concept of genius. (And it is from genius that inspiration has often been believed to come.)

According to wikipedia, “In Ancient Rome, the genius was the guiding or “tutelary” spirit of a person.” Once again, then, there is an externality. Inspiration comes from outside, and the artist is the vessel through which the god speaks. Genius is a seperate entity, and the artist was guided by it. Another interesting etymological point, now. From wiki, once more:

Whether there’s a common root to genie and genius is in question, but it’s interesting nonetheless, and the concept of the genie is a good one to associate with the classic meaning of genius.

The common trend here is externality, and it illustrates just why the hermetic production team of Who are floundering so badly. After the equally horrendous Last of the Time Lords and Voyage of the Damned, the show’s prospects are somewhat worrying. RTD needs to get out, but that seems unlikely, so I turn to hope he’ll get breathed on, or find himself an old lamp to rub. I have some optimism that this Piers Wenger bloke (who I know nothing about) may reveal himself to be RTD’s genius, and I wish he was coming in before 2010.

Failing that, my vote’s on Tesla.

George sat on a chair in his breeze-block basement. In his hand he held a moderate length of aluminium tubing, on which lower end a thick cylinder of concrete was stuck. Not, you understand, in the manner of croquet mallet, but more in the shape of an immense party popper who’s squat nub (itself uncomfortably reminiscent of a distended nipple) had been elongated into a substantial handle. And just what such an item would be for, and what it might be a part of, was irrelevant, and seemed not to be a concern of the thing, as though it merely existed for its own sake.

George’s hand rested loosely about the metal, as he might hold his shaft when absently stroking himself to erection. His elbow cut into his knee for support, and the concrete bulb hung half a foot from the ground. As George sat, he applied the smallest fraction of impetus to the Thing, just enough for the concrete’s own momentum to collide it against the wall. As it kissed off the stone it sailed back an inch or so, and George’s wrist twitched microscopically, enough to carry it to its zenith, where it hung with exactly the potential to do it all again. The weight of it was comfortable, and deeply so, and there was a familiarity to the feel of it such that George understood the thing intimately, and knew the potential he felt at the apex of its swing. It had an inevitability, a certainty that it would collide again and again, each time exactly the same. The collisions were gentle, they felt almost soft, though both surfaces were as hard as rock. Each soft touch said that it could be so much more. George could feel the force of the device oozing from it. He thought it could probably cave someone’s head in like an egg if you swung it hard enough.

George bumped the concrete against the wall again. He thought about swinging the device harder, about what it could do. He felt the sudden urge to whirl it about with all its might, to make the stone about him explode with the force of it. He imagined the wall was a fat, repulsive woman. He imagined her body bursting apart as he connected the thing with her spilling belly. Globs of flesh vibrated as they arced through the air.

When all of this was new, back when the world was young and the comic heroes of legend were first turning their attentions inward for humorous effect, these self-references were genuinely funny because they rode on the back of an established pantheon of real comic devices. They exposed the cracks in the comic system and subjected it to itself, shattering the unspoken agreement between author and audience that kept the inner workings of the joke off limits. (Every now and again comedy attempts to utilise shock value by turning its attention to something that was assumed taboo. That’s all that this is; metahumour is no ‘higher’ a form of comedy than David Walliams sucking some woman’s tit. The only difference is subject matter. More on that later.) It worked, and it took off, and that’s where it all went wrong.

Nothing is so guaranteed to exhaust itself as popularity (and this is why much that truly endures earns itself cult status – it never exposes itself utterly, but modestly presents itself to the few who really get it, and thus forms its niche). Like a poor stand-up who retells the material of others without ever really understanding it, the new generation of comic writers, more concerned with success than their own intuitive sense of humour, leapt upon metahumour, but they didn’t get the punchline. Founding shows on breaking of the fourth wall, on running jokes and attacking their own trends, they never appreciated that metahumour was not a joke upon itself, but upon the secret reality of all and any jokes, the archetypal joke. Subtracting the metahumour from the new shows left nothing, they were founded only on self-parody, and so had no self to parody. And what is truly ironic is that, in assuming a device centred upon the self-reference, the self-analysis, they make explicit their own vacuousity.

Enter Howard Moon and Vince Noir to show us where it all went wrong. Watching the Boosh turning their attention on themselves, all of the above becomes clear. Far more inspired than insipid and empty self-parodies, they don’t merely take the piss out of themselves reflexively, they realise their ironies as a separate entity; the unspoken and the unseen is suddenly spoken to and seen. Combined with an episode focussed on the strange quirky ‘crimping’ that has been with the show from the start and jokes about having the wrong scripts, there was a brief moment of doubt where it seemed the Boosh had finally become like everyone else. This was of course folly. The pair’s introspection worked because it had an internality to explore. The past two and a half series of Boosh have been founded on genuine material, substantial characters, settings and devices, and so there actually is something to observe here.

Note that the Boosh has always displayed its nature; for a long time every episode started with Howard’s greeting of ‘welcome to the show’, and the pair have never taken pains to disguise the artificial nature of sets and costumes, quite the opposite. Where they differ from the masses is that this display of the behind-the-scenes (or, perhaps more accurately, the being-a-scene, the scene as a scene) is the way of being. The Boosh presents its nature as a performance not as some sort of secret nod of inclusion to an audience suspending their disbelief (and thus suspending themselves from inclusion), but as the nature of the show’s world. There is no ‘real world’ of the Boosh, which the audience is required to believe as true. The Boosh is always and before all else an act. This is the joke. The Boosh are not breaking the fourth wall, they have never erected one.

So it is that when the pair finally introduce metahumour to their show, there is a base of humour existent; the beyond-humour has something to go beyond, and is substantial. The Boosh have finally recaptured what made these devices so effective when they were popular the first time. And this is in such sharp contrast to the humdrum fakers of comedy, the myriad Flighty Zeuses, that not only does it successfully recapture the comic impact of those classics, it also shows us precisely why it has been a failure since. “Come with us now on a journey through time… And space!” commands the voice of some omnipotent being over the opening credits of the show, but it seems like the world of the Mighty Boosh might be nothing less remarkable than our own world, thrown into sharp relief; the detachment offered us by a temporal and spatial exodus the only way we can view it.

And yet all of this may be bollocks, because metahumour isn’t really a comedic device at all. There is no method of delivery here, no lens through which a particular take on a subject is offered. In fact metahumour is the subject. Humour about humour is no more a device than humour about kittens. The mistake was in giving it its own name. When they named it, people began to mistakenly believe it actually was something.

…And that’s why I can’t go for that.

I really did mean to make something of my blog.com blog. Really I did. Unfortunately, blog.com didn’t mean me to. Quite possibly the template editor is working fine now, but it was down for long enough that I gave up on it. So, now I have a new blog. It looks sort of nice, althoughI have to actually pay actual money to be able to customise the theme, so that’s a bit shit.

A blog, when you get right down to it, is basically a presentational device. It’s another way of sketching a picture of you on the world. So a blog host with a broken template editor isn’t actually anything at all. Not having customisation is pretty poor also, but I’ll perservere.

The other disappointment is that otherwords.wordpress.com was already taken, so I’ll have to make do with otherword, which isn’t half as good. Again, it’s a rough edge on the image I’m trying to project here. That’s one thing blogspot has over this.

I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but this editor appears to indent my paragraphs. That’s nice. One thing that annoys me about forum software is it usually doesn’t allow for indentation.

In other news*, my flatmate has perfected a sublime form of mental torture the likes of which has not been seen since the heyday of the Inquisition. (Their main weapon was surprise.) I was waken from my bed today by the orations of Robbie Williams proclaiming his disinclination to rock, disc jockey. And that’s fine. I’m not going to begrudge him terrible 90s pop. But what’s beyond me, what I can only assume is a sinister, abominable machination of the man, is that he listens to it daily. Multiple times. I don’t suppose anyone else has experienced this particular trial, but there is only so long you can last before it begins to eat into your sanity. I’ve started humming it! Humming it! Without knowing! People will think I’m crazy! Every day he plays it! Is it all he owns? And if it is, wouldn’t he eventually get tired of it? Someone was singing it at the society yesterday and I honestly, for one moment, thought that perhaps I was the subject of some grand conspiracy.

That’s enough rambling. I’ll return in due time with some actual content.

If I last that long.

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* I kind of like the idea of having a separate blog for news aggregation running in tandem with this one which I could call Other News. I wish I knew how to hyperlink this footnote up and shrink the text so it looked a bit more snazzy. Snazzy? I am losing it.